


i'm the son of rage and love.

by ruruka



Category: The Ren & Stimpy Show
Genre: M/M, non-graphic mentions of child abuse drug usage drinking general violence among other things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:54:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26843203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: surprise surprise, everything's gone to shit again.
Relationships: Stimpson "Stimpy" J. Cat/Ren Höek
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	i'm the son of rage and love.

Stir crazy, no- Ren doesn’t get stir crazy, it’s stir mad. Stir _MAD..!_

Ren doesn’t get stir crazy because staying in one place far too long means there’s somewhere for him to stay. Being stir crazy is a treat.

A green lighter that died three days ago flicks under his thumb, shakes its silent lack of fluid, flicks under his thumb where there’s the faintest smirk of a callus, hits noiselessly the living room carpet. A red lighter that guided the last two packs of menthols to salvation flicks, shakes, flicks, flicks, flicks, flicks, could just about shatter on the coffee table wood. Between the couch cushions he shoves a hand up to the wrist. There’s two pennies congealed together with something stupid, two loose on their own, just about eight pounds of shedded fur and crumbs of cat litter, and, yes, just perfect, the yellow lighter that some dick at work probably stole last week. It’s the translucent gas station counter kind that’s good for about two cigs, and his eye meets the sip of lighter fluid left inside the same way a mother holds her first son. 

He flicks it. The metal sparks orange like it’s trying, at least. Flick. Spark. Shake tip tilt. Spark.

“Come on,” growls from under his tongue. “Can’t a man smoke some fucking crack around here…”

Another dozen strokes of the metal wheel offer no results. Hands ablaze in jittering ire, he flings the lighter and the filthy glass pipe both to the coffee table, trading them in resignation for a cigarette from the open pack on the table. Like clockwork he reaches for a lighter, all the way to sitting in wide eyed stillness that ends with a molar clenching sigh.

“Whatcha doing, Ren?” Stimpy says from the nearest door to where Ren stands, no more than a minute later, hunched over the gas range dials, cigarette pinched one end in his lips and the other in the burner he urges into lighting. 

After several clicks, the flame ring hushes alive, jerking his head back just enough to keep his nose from searing off with a lit smoke in tow. He breathes a thick drag of it before coughing out, “I’m _unwinding_ after a long day. Don’t bother me.” Strong palm on the counter’s edge, Ren uses the other to drag the cig again. In a cloud of gray, his head turns to pin Stimpy in a thin leer. “What do you want?”

“ _Awww,_ is someone stressed?” Stimpy meows in so unpatronizing a way that couldn’t come from anyone else. The kitchen homes them both aside the still-lit stove once Stimpy ambles over, gripping Ren up by either side of the waist. 

“Back off,” Ren warns, demanding the hands away with his own, but they can only squeeze tighter the bony flesh of his hips. He scowls. Ash showers idly from the tip of the cigarette. “I don’t need you to fix my stress. All I need is some peace, some _quiet,_ and a goddamn working lighter!”

In one shrill twang, Stimpy yelps in delight, throwing Ren from his grip to instead search through a pocket. He lifts again his hand, and within it glints the plastic of a black lighter. 

“Give me that!” Ren insists, steals it up without waiting for approval. With one eye he squints at the device, and with the other stares pink and bold at the perpetrator. “Where did you get this? You’re not touching my collection of dead Bulgarian celebrities’ bongs again, are you?!”

“I got it,” he says, squints his eyes and drawls out, “from my _frieeend._ You know, the one that lives in my nostril.”

Lips dropped, Ren stares dumbly at him. “You mean Rodney?”

“No, no, the _right_ nostril, not the left. Georgie gave it to me.”

“I don’t want you hanging out with these types of people anymore. All the drinking, and the smoking, and the _downtown_ accents.” Ren leers darkly up the holes of his nose. Relenting, he brings the cigarette to his mouth again, huffing back on it with a curious flick on the new lighter that, kindly, produces a small flame. “They’re bad influences.”

“Oh, pshaw, Ren, they don’t mean any harm.” A pink kitty tongue falls wetly out of Stimpy’s smile. “Besides, you know I have- _huh, huh -_ good taste in relationships.”

This time when he wraps an arm around Ren’s waist, there’s no resistance, just Ren and his tight gaze pulling closer to him. Stimpy grins, and Ren pulls the smoke from his mouth just to twitch the thinnest smirk and kiss his asinine mouth.

“Let’s go to bed,” Ren says, nudges his elbow toward the door, and whether within the command lives a wisp of innuendo he isn’t yet sure.

(He is sure after it’s done, after the spanking and the swearing and the begging’s all done, and the black lighter fulfills its first task of sparking up a post-fuck smoke, he’s sure everything _sucks_ in the world but maybe everything’s as right as it can be right then).

Ren closes his eyes but does not sleep, not quite, listens instead to the snoring on his chest and the humid summer midnight outside the open window. He sighs, and the night sighs with him. It’s something like every hour just lives to repeat itself the next day. Morning to noon and noon to night it’s the arthritic crick in his wrist with every pull of every lever at the factory. Then he comes home, and there’s dark gray meat and a glass of Daniels for dinner, there’s passing the time to the tune of the dripping kitchen faucet and fifteen hours of cartoon reruns. Sometimes he fingers through the record box, the bright red milk crate that keeps track of all the vinyls that’ve gotten mixed together into one pile over years of constant moving and storage unit shuffling- yes, he keeps the fancy ones separate, the opera ones with bubblegum residue filling in the grooves, the Sinatra and Anka ones, but he isn’t bothered enough to separate his Depeche Mode and Cure from the Sammy Mantis and Wizzleteats mixed in. Sometimes he fingers through the record box and it smells a little basementy, a little mildew and stagnancy, but for god’s sake it’s here stored underneath the record player on its fine wood side table, and he’s crouched down with a bite of an ache in the knees to do so, here in the living room, yes, it’s quite nice to have all that. Even if the carpets in this apartment smell like dried piss.

His eyelids are swelled with fatigue when next he blinks, hardly able to manage more than a squint until- and it’s a sudden lash -he’s sitting bolt straight with nostrils flaring. An odd odd odd... _stench,_ and he’s halfway convinced Stimpy’s shit his half of the bed were it not for the sickly familiar scent of burning plastic.

“ _Stimpy_ ,” Ren barks, taps a finger on the shoulder beside him. “Stimpy. Wake up.”

“What’s the matter, Ren?” asks the deep gravel of Stimpy’s voice as he shifts awake, squints in the room lit by the sliver of moon and the clock screaming one:fourteen. 

“What’s that smell?” Ren says. He sniffs again, and Stimpy mirrors him, deep inhales with his whole chest that draw him back in a cringe once the stink in question berates his nose. Lip quirked down, Stimpy shrugs, and the blanket tosses from them both as they move to push through the latched bedroom door. 

It creaks forward on the hinges, and Ren all but coughs his guts up onto that piss smelling carpet.

“ _MOTHER OF GOD, MAN!_ The whole damn place is on _FIRE!”_

Eyes bulging and lungs throbbing. Ren sways his wild gaze toward the kitchen door from where smoke pours, frozen as time feels standing there in the threshold. He thinks he watches Stimpy flail for the kitchen, and he thinks he watches himself follow, or not, or- yes- or- uh- but the next thing he’s certain he feels is the cold of the kitchen tile on his toes (which is a good sign, right, yeah, _if the tile’s still cold it can’t be that bad!)_ and the sight to match is a pitiful mug of water tossed on the flame that engulfs the stovetop and adjacent counter.

“That’s not gonna do anything!” tears from Ren’s throat, and he’s rushing forward without thinking much of it. “Put the fire out, you idiot! Hurry- _YAH!”_

For all of two seconds he’s yelping out the panic of someone who’s just noticed his pajama sleeve has caught flame. Ren flails, shakes his arm enough to snap it from the socket before Stimpy’s on him to yank his top off and fan it wildly against the fire. Ren huddles in on himself. Shakes like a natural born Chihuahua. A pace away, Stimpy holds onto the shirt like a burning flag, watching it burn a moment before tossing it in with the rest of the flames.

“Hmmm,” rubs thoughtfully Stimpy’s chin. His composure trades for a bawdy smile and a finger in the air. “Oh, I know! We should call the Fiery Department! They shall certainly help us in our time of need.”

“What’re you waiting for?! Go on and ca-!”

The door behind him is kicked right off the hinges. Ren groans from underneath it, coughing harder at the weight of two bustling men stomping over it to find their way to the center of action. Arms quivering, Ren pushes himself up enough to see the both of them, tall and stocky, the left one tipping his red rubber hat, the right one scratching the stubble of his chin as he assesses, “Yep. That’s definitely a fire.”

“Textbook fire,” the first fireman nods back.

In one quick shove, the door flies off his back and Ren’s on his feet beside them, one lean meter of muscle and wrath. “Don’t just _stand there!_ Put it out, you morons! Put it out!”

Wordlessly, the firemen glance at him, to each other, shrug in near tandem before a piercing whistle stings from the second man’s fingers to lips. Ren bats his wide eyes over a shoulder just in time to be thwacked in the head by the metal end of a firehose flinging through the broken doorway.

“Easy, girl,” one of the men hushes as he gets a grip on the thrashing hose. A wide gloved hand pats the metal end until it relaxes, exploding a stream of water onto their kitchen counters with a chorus of glass shattering, wallpaper peeling, wood splintering. 

Ren bites so harshly his lip he just about watches his teeth tear through the second side.

“It doesn’t look so bad,” is the first thing either of them can say, and of course it’s Stimpy ( _of course it is),_ looking over their ashen countertops and melted stove. The cabinets above hang their splintered doors from the hinges. The wet counter lip drips a melodic tune.

“Are you crazy?!” Ren snaps with a snarl on his lip. They stand aside one another in their kitchen, the first place they’ve had the confidence to call home in months, just about, the home they’ve held longer than any other on the list. Ren’d moved in and set the record box down, sure, and he’d laid awake on Sunday mornings listening to their neighbors’ shitty drumset getting pounded like a horny blonde through the walls, and he’d thought how he might just miss it in a month or two when the eviction slip gets stapled to his forehead. Because that’s how it always goes. He and Chuck’s smelly dorm room had perhaps been the last stable bed he’d known. 

And now half the kitchen’s burned down. The perfect excuse to boot out the two dumbfucks who’s rent has never been less than eight days late. Ren drops his face in both hands and sobs. “My...security deposit…”

“Aww, there there, Ren, it’s okay,” Stimpy coos with an arm round his shoulders. “Everybody leaves the stove on sometimes.”

“Maybe if you weren’t so _DISTRACTING_ ,” he shouts, teeth bared, though relax finds him enough to claw fingers down his face til the pink beneath both eyes meets the light. “What are we gonna do now? We’re gonna get kicked out, and just when I thought we’d almost _made_ something of ourselves! Can’t I catch a break once in a while?!”

Water drips plainly from the counter lip the same way it does Ren’s eyes, fallen desperately to his knees in harsh wailing sobs. Stimpy stands behind him, lip quivering to such a cerulean sight, until all at once he perks into a tremendous grin and tells him, “I know! Let’s call your pa-”

“Don’t you even _think_ about saying we’ll call my parents!” In an abrupt crunch of bone, Ren is on his feet, ears pointed high rather than drooping low behind him. He stabs an index finger into the blue flesh of Stimpy’s nose. _Honk._ “I’d rather live on the streets than with them! I’d rather be DEAD!”

Blinking, frowning, Stimpy balks backward. “But- But isn’t it better to-”

“Let’s use the money for the cable bill to buy some plane tickets,” Ren says, one fist hitting its opposite palm. “I’ll call Sven, we’ll go to Dinkelsbühl and stay with him for a while, yeah. Stimpy, get my suitcase.”

“Oh, but, Ren,” Stimpy says, only slightly flinches when harsh eyes pin him. His head shakes. “It’s July, which means Sven is on his backpacking tour of Scandinavia for the annual Kroppkakor and Clogging Festival. He told me all about it in his last letter.”

Eyes goggling either direction, Stimpy digs a piece of lined paper from his pocket and hands it over. Ren stares for half a minute at the crude pencil drawing of his cousin holding what an arrow points out as _potatoe yumplings_ before crumpling the note up into a ball that hits Stimpy squarely in the face.

“That’s great. _Juuust_ great!” Through the busted shades of the single kitchen window, the sky finds its first strokes of orange. Ren thumps his forehead to the refrigerator door and heaves in a wicked breath. “I can’t rely on my family, I can’t rely on the government, I can’t rely on my fat, stupid, white boyfriend. Who can I count on anymore?”

“Daaah…” Stimpy blinks, tongue lazily out. “Powdered Toast Man!”

Lips languid, Ren looks to him in what may be repulsion, what may be pity. Again rattles an exhausted inhale. “Listen, Stimpson, it’s time you learned a valuable lesson about this thing we call _life._ ” The fridge door claps open and shut again, a cold Budweiser in his hand. “The truth is, the only person I can trust to do anything right, to do anything that requires any amount of common intellect is,” and refreshingly pops the tab on the can in a hiss of carbonation, “myself.”

He tips his head back, the flow of beer gulping down his throat as Stimpy wiggles a long finger in the air. “Say, Ren, remember the time we saw your mother for her birthday, and-”

“How many more times must I _TELL YOU!”_ sprays into his face, can of booze abandoned into a leaking puddle on the tile, all four paws hooked onto Stimpy’s stomach. Ren’s eyes spin in a wild strain of pink and red. “I’m a full grown purebred asthma-hound Chihuahua! I don’t need anybody’s help, I don’t need my mom and her- her birthday cakes, and her red rice...and pulled pork huevos rancheros...and l-liver and onions...and warm, loving embrace…”

Staring practically through him, Ren absently kneads his front paws on Stimpy’s fur, lapping a trail of drool from his bottom jowl. Stimpy eyes him down with a thousand toothed smile. 

Two suitcases thunk thickly onto the concrete front steps.

“My _baby!”_

Somehow, he remembers his mother being taller. Not quite so tall as his father- his father’s always been about ten feet tall, maybe six on the better days. He’d remembered his mother as tall and skinny with that pointy face of hers, hair bleached in box dye and smelling like linens. He remembers his house with its brick front and white panelling on the higher sides, a lush front lawn that led all the way to the dead end road where he’d play street hockey with the neighbor boys until someone got a puck to the face. 

(Stimpy remembers much less. Stimpy remembers coming here for a handful of birthdays that would end at the exact same time Sunday mass did. Stimpy remembers that Ren’s mom is a nice nice nice nice nice nice lady who listens to the same radio stations when she’s cooking in the kitchen that Ren does in the car, and she sings in just as lovely Spanish as he does, too, and Stimpy remembers perhaps best of all the bologna sandwich she made him when they visited six Christmases ago, because she put mustard on it, and he really likes bologna sandwiches with mustard and he really likes nice blonde ladies with big boobs).

Everything is just about the same as Ren last left it in his mind. The brick and the panelling, the lawn, the box bleach. His mother’s still got the frenzy in her shrill voice when she throws the door open and gasps, “My _baby!”_ and bundles both her arms up around...Stimpy.

“Baaah,” Stimpy drools lamely over her shoulder. “Salutations, Mrs. Höek.”

Brow fallen low, Ren sneers at the pair of them. “Good to see you, too, Mom.”

Peeling herself away, his mother smiles, leans forward to squeeze his face in both hands. Ren’s eyes bulge. 

“Of course I didn’t forget you, _my handsome little maaan_.” It’s hardly as endearing as when Stimpy calls him that. She relaxes her hands, allows him enough room to breathe whilst she fawns. “I was just beside myself when you called! I picked up and heard your voice and I said, ‘Ren? Is it really you?’”

“Yeah, I know,” Ren says, following the sway of his mother’s skirt once she leads them through the front hall. Stimpy follows closely behind with both of their bags in tow. “I was there.”

“You’ve gotten so big since I last saw you! What was that by now, three years ago? Your coat looks so healthy. And that dew claw! How wonderful!”

“Let up now. You’re embarrassing me.”

“I can’t help but think my baby is so handsome,” makes Ren grin halfway, and, “You look just like your father now!” steals it right off.

Suitcase wheels clunk softly on the kitchen floor. It’s as clean and square as he remembers.

“Say, Mom, speaking of Dad,” Ren starts with a curl to his lip. “How did he take it? You know, that we’re...going to be spending a few quick nights here?”

His mother’s got her bare feet on like she always does. There’s a distinctive little _tap tap_ as she walks across the tile, claws pattering on the kitchen floor like they always did when she moves to present a glass platter of sandwiches right under his nose. “Are you hungry? I made your favorite!” she flutes, and it’s only then that he spots the tight, nerved expression come to life on her face.

Ren squints upward at his mother, huffs enough air to repeat himself but never knows the chance; between the two of them pops the head of the third, dopey blue nose snuffling all over the tray of sandwiches. Stimpy recoils with a look of despair. “Eugh...olive loaf.”

“Don’t worry, honey!” she shouts like she’s humping the distraction for dear life. Her delicate hands choose two slices of white bread centered by circles of lunch meat. Mustard drips wetly from it to hit the floor below.

“Happy! Happy!” With a squelch of damp bread, Stimpy grabs onto the proffered sandwich, stuffed into his mouth in its entirety to chew open mouthed and loud. 

“So,” Ren intervenes. A hundred nerves burn in his throat with the urge to skim his knuckles across Stimpy’s mustard flecked cheek. Rather, he clears it. “So, about my rat bastard father.”

“Have a sandwich, baby,” Mrs. Höek says, pinches his cheek a touch too roughly.

Ren opens his mouth to argue and has it stuffed with olive loaf on rye. 

The _tap tap_ this time is quicker, fading off into the distance behind them. Scowling darkly, Ren eyes the swinging door of the kitchen all the way to its halt. 

“Your mom is almost as nice as you, Ren,” Stimpy beams.

“Shut up,” he barks back, ripping the head off his sandwich with crooked front teeth.

By the time all he’s got left are the crumbs brushing from both hands, everything just about comes right back up onto the floor. 

Ren watches the sound of the door opening behind them. An elbow jabbed into Stimpy’s stomach knocks the life back into him, draws him from the lazy, drooling reverie of standing beside one another in silence so long as the minutes it’s been. He taps Ren’s taut shoulder, if only to ask what’s happening, if only to check his wellbeing, but Ren remains steadfast in his focus for the kitchen entry and the shadow that falls over his staid, stiff, straight back. 

Tension ties the knot, and ire kicks the chair. That’s something like what rolls around behind Ren’s eyes when he sees his father walk into the house, boots clean and cross gold. He remembers his father exactly as he stands there across from him. A measly, balding German. Ren remembers him the same way he had been when Ren was still a puppy in his litter of one: a trailer park drunk that likes to say he turned his life around through the power of Him, right around when Ren was four or five, yeah, that’s when his father started hiding behind psalms. Ren remembers that year and all the ones before, remembers that the only thing that changed when his father traded Marlboros for God was that the belt hurt even more, since sins can’t be vanquished with bare hands alone. And he knows for certain that he remembers, because this memory still fucking makes him need Ambien to sleep, he knows for certain he remembers that it was _Sven_ who got the scratch on his father’s ‘81 Camaro (the church pays good, the church is why they got to move into that nice new house with the brick on the front and the big Somewhere That’s Green type lawn, the church is just as good as Him) while they were kicking rocks around the side yard, but his father didn’t believe him for shit, and his wrist burned with how tightly it was gripped to drag him inside the house, and he doesn’t resent Sven for it because they were eleven and he tried to tell the truth, too, but nobody believes eleven year olds, and nobody can leave a bruise like Reverend Höek.

Ren breathes shallowly. He sees his mother standing there behind his father, hands clasped in front of her hips, and something like a mirror splits the room to notice Stimpy standing just a step behind himself. A citric expression plays at his face. Ren turns away from the brief glance to face his father again, barely blinking, chin tipped high.

“Hello, Ren,” says the Reverend at last. Just like he remembers. Ren’s always hated the way his father talks, with his teeth hardly ever moving, just lips animated over them to pour words over his head like dirty bathwater. Just like he remembers. “Your mother told me you’ve asked to stay here a while. With your...friend.”

The back of Ren’s hand swipes over his mouth. One last breath ricochets through him, just enough to keep him calm, anything to keep him calm. For now.

“Yep. Hope you don’t care.” He beckons forward his second player with a hand. “Come, Stimpy, let’s bring our things upstairs.”

“Oh, sweetness,” interjects his mother before they’ve more than a step toward the stairs. “You’ll have to stay in the living room for now. Your father’s been using your old room as a confessional.”

If he could help it, he may’ve not let his face implode into such disgust and appall, but there he stands gawking at the news that the same bedroom he’d jacked off in three times a day as a teenager is being used for God-fearing pearl-clutchers to apologize for eating steak on a Friday. Or whatever else God sends you to Hell for. 

“You might like to make your way up there sometime,” his father remarks in passing, and, in passing, Ren remarks back, “Nah, I’m fine with going to Hell. No more heating bill.”

Slightly, he notes the clench to his father’s jaw. Ren just about bites his tongue off in sick glee until his mother improvs, “I’ll give you your old blankets to make the futon up with tonight! Won’t you like that?”

“There’s an air mattress in the hall closet,” adds his father, and with the next generosity addresses Stimpy with a demanding stare. “You might be more comfortable there.”

“Oh, no, sir,” Stimpy says, and he shakes his head, and Ren wishes he couldn’t believe it when he sees the bright smile on his face and hears him say, “Ren and I always share one bed. It’s very cozy,” but he does believe it, because Stimpy really does have a brain that rattles freely around his skull.

“I think you’ll be more comfortable,” the Reverend assures, more starkly this time, eyes thrice as pinning, dark. Stimpy’s mouth lowers in confusion. Ren grinds his enamel to a fine powder.

“Yeah, whatever, I don’t care,” Ren dismisses just to free them of the situation’s bondage. “Let’s go, Stimpy.”

His feet patter toward the hall to the living room and the suitcases roll behind again, Stimpy the separating factor between. “But, Ren,” he goes teary eyed in saying, dual shadows crawling down the hallway walls. “ _I don’t wanna sleep without you!”_

“Would you be quiet already?” They pause to allow Ren to fish through the closet he yanks open, slaps it back closed with a boxed up mattress under one arm. “I’m just gonna set it up to keep the old fuck off my back, and then you can move onto the bed with me.”

Stimpy sniffs, and he’s back to all smiles chasing Ren through the living room archway. “Oh, thank goodness! I thought for a second that you might not _like_ me anymore.”

“You thought right.” Both cushions lift from the couch to hit the floor. Ren surveys the metal handle and the bedframe folded up inside. Just the same. All of it. “Be useful and come pull the bed out for me, would you, baby?”

When at last he’s able to lay his knotted back on the futon’s creaking, crunching springs, it isn’t any less than seven or ten hours later. They vacated their apartment with only the essentials packed up into their coughing station wagon, and an apology sticky note left on the melted stovetop. Clothes and toiletries stuffed into suitcases stashed now behind his parents’ living room couch. Drawers of trinkets pulled from their tracks and a box of mixed up records tossed into the car’s backseat. They’d showed up at his parents’ place, been force fed sandwiches, threw his boyhood bedding on the futon and hightailed it for the rest of the afternoon. For its better part, Ren spent time sifting through what of their things they’d managed to toss in the car, idling two streets over in a McDonald’s parking lot to rummage around in a box of condoms and rolling papers and the occasional lint-covered Altoid. He’d found half a warm bottle of whiskey in a milk crate behind the passenger side, nursed it idly while Stimpy settled for a soda bought with loose center console change from the drive thru window ten feet away. 

But that’s just a memory now. He’s on the futon. Watching the ceiling. It’s the white one he looked up at when he was seven, his mother’s hand clutched tight around his own to keep him from wandering, the voice of a stranger echoing like mad throughout the unfurnished rooms as she guided them through their new home. He’d looked up at the ceiling and saw there was no fan on it, and that’s the first time he can recall acknowledging their newfound wealth. The second time had to be around when his father drove home in a same-year Camaro, or perhaps when he’d signed the lease on that nice vacation cabin. He hadn’t hated spending time there as a child, nor as an adult with just himself and his idiot, the one time they’d been allowed to borrow it for the snowiest weekend of the decade. 

But that’s just a memory. He’s on the futon. And Stimpy’s standing over him. 

“Your bathroom sure is extravagant,” Stimpy comments, pajamas soft and linty. “I can see myself in the mirror! And the soap is better than any I’ve ever tasted.”

Arms folded behind his head, Ren stares up at him in manslaughtering vexation. “You left the light on.”

In response, Stimpy drops a look over his shoulder to the gleam pouring in from the corridor. Instinct moves him to unscrew his nose, gliding it like a boomerang into the next room where it hits the lightswitch off, returns back to his face without a snag. 

The blanket corner lifts. Stimpy crawls onto the futon and is welcomed by the noise of age old springs creaking under his weight, and the warmth of a moody Chihuahua returning his immediate cuddle. Beside them lives the untouched air mattress. 

“I like this more than sleeping under newspapers in the car,” Stimpy says as if it’d been an ambivalent decision he’d had to sit on all day. To Ren it’s almost the same, only his answer after all the pondering could differ. Depends on if he can sleep tonight. 

Without any response, Stimpy goes on, “And I like your mom. Do you think I could help her with breakfast tomorrow?”

The giddiness to his voice, the dreamy way his tongue pokes out. Ren grunts through his nose. Some spot on the cream colored wall behind his head makes an appetizing place to stare blankly for hours on end. Anywhere besides the frames above it, the nice mahogany ones with pictures inside that he hadn’t wanted to be part of, and the grip that’d been clamped on his shoulders that didn’t photograph in them as well as it did in his memory. 

“Ren?” 

Pink eyes blink once. His focus shifts from the wall to the one before him. 

“Are you angry?” Stimpy wonders. “You look angry.”

“I’m fine,” Ren sighs. Shoulders high with breath, he lets it out in a thick exhale as he’s pulling himself away to lay again on his back. “Let’s just get some sleep.”

“Okay,” he hears in that overly excited pitch Stimpy never gets into for any real reason, just before a kiss meets his cheek and a sugared, “Goodnight _Reeen,_ ” meets his ears.

The mattress creaks again when Stimpy turns swiftly onto his other side, blankets gripped up all around him, snoring an easy tune in no less than thirty more seconds. Maybe a lobotomy is what Ren needs. Yeah. Stupid people always sleep the best.

To that standard he ought to qualify for Mensa by the time the sun’s rolling over the windows and he’s still staring at the same white spot on the same white ceiling. 

Sometime in the night he knows he closed his eyes, and he knows his brain shut up long enough to not remember an hour or two here and there, one most prominent being somewhere in the early morning, because he closed eyes with Stimpy sleeping beside him and opened them again to Stomper Room on the box TV and a cold second half of the bed. He must have dozed again, either very much or not quite so, long enough at least for the program to switch over to Muddy Mudskipper and the clock to read twelve:thirty-nine.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” Stimpy says as soon as the bed makes its first creak, one of Ren shifting himself to sitting upright. He’s surprised Stimpy noticed anything at all besides the screen melting his retinas. Glancing forward, Ren sees the room mostly still the same, save for noticing Stimpy unpacked. His empty suitcase sits in the corner still unzipped. Beneath him, his first material possession spills cat litter into the carpet. 

“What’s good about it,” Ren rhetorically gripes, cranky from the shitty sleep and the shitty mattress and the shitty taste his shitty father left in his mouth still from yesterday. He can only be thankful he spends so many hours a day sucking off Jesus at the church across town. Their paths should cross minimally, if all goes right. Ren sits up just enough to fumble for the trail of belongings on the floor beside the bed, the first being a cigarette he lights on the third attempt, the second being the warm Dr. Pepper from last night, sipping its watery ice melted flatness just to replace the disgusting taste of morning with something else. The hand not doused in condensation brings the cigarette to his lips, inhaling about four seconds worth before he gags on the shock of it being snatched right away from him.

“Not in my house, mijo,” his mother chides from beside him, shaking the menthol in her hand until it puts itself out. Hands to hips, she pouts at him all the way to his ears drooping in the same childish shame she could always get out of him. Another grasp extends to steal the cup from him. “And no soda for breakfast! Didn’t I raise a gentleman?” 

“I’m a gentleman,” Ren says meekly, bottom lip quivering up at her, blankets pulling higher in his grasp.

Either of his mother’s arms splay, items discarded with a far off noise of shattering glass. “Of course you are,” she coos, and he’s almost smiling when she moves in for a hug only to slap him starkly on the arm. Ren gawks, searches for a handprint but finds rather stuck to his throbbing bicep a Nicotine Patch. 

“Come and have lunch when you’re ready, boys,” trails with his mother’s exit.

On the aching futon, its floral sheets that smell of age and laundry soap, Ren sits close to dumbly, but he’s got enough left in him to shrug, lean back, and pull another Newport from the pack. 

It’s four nights later that he talks to his father again in what consists of more than passing grunts. 

Mrs. Höek insists on fussing over them in a way that all mothers do. Pinching faces. Overfeeding. Vacuuming the living room before nine in the morning. Stimpy takes it all in stride. Some mornings Ren creaks his eyes open to find him with one of his mother’s aprons knotted around his waist, _la-la-la_ ing his feather duster around the shelves no one in a house of purebred Chihuahuas can reach. On those mornings, just the same as the ones where he wakes to Stimpy’s hands stuffed in two pink oven mitts, or knitting needles marathoning through sweater yarn, Ren curls into a ball on his side and pretends to go back to sleep. 

But it isn’t the morning now, it’s four nights later, sun already set, lace red curtains already down. Since arriving here, the only time Ren has been able to rid his stomach of a certain layer of sickness is when he’s herded Stimpy in the station wagon passenger side, himself the driver to wherever the road takes them. Most often, it’s the parking lot down the street, because gas prices went up eight cents between ‘95 and ‘96. But it’s something. They spent a few hours in their usual spot. Watching strangers, making up their lives like finger puppets through the windshield. Ren takes the time away from his parents to roll a joint or snort a quick line off the dashboard. Stimpy takes the time to simply enjoy the time, and that’s well enough for someone like him. 

“That guy was engaged to a redhead,” Ren had said of some schmuck walking past the car today. He gestured to him with the mouthpiece of the bong in his hand before taking a smoky puff off it. “Huge tits.”

Stimpy clapped his hands to his face in woe. “What happened to her?”

Thoroughly hotboxed, Ren’s lip wiggled with sinister laughter, flicking his lighter on and off for the sick joy of it alone. “She got hit by a bus. And fell off a cliff. Into a big _pit_ of- of sharp, pointy, ostrich skeletons.”

“It’s too horrible! Stop it, stop!” Stimpy wailed. His forehead hit the glovebox door with a miserable sob. When again his head lifted, his eyes were dry and scrutinizing, scanning across the parking lot until his excitement settled on a thin blonde man strutting by. “His name is... _daahh_...Samuel K. Milkjuggler! And he is the Brazilian ambassador to the United States! If anybody else knew he were here, there’d be a line out the door for autographs...because he’s also the critically acclaimed inventor of the egg white and goat gelatin sandwich.”

“His wife left him because he has a small dick,” Ren added.

“And he loves to partake in recreational water polo!” Stimpy nodded, too.

“That makes no sense, what in the hell is water polo?” Ren glared toward him, exhausted. “Horses can’t even swim.”

Stimpy lifted a thoughtful finger to his chin. Ren’s eyes rolled all the way to gripping the gear shift. “It’s getting dark, let’s go pick up the milk my mom asked for.”

Loyal a sidekick as ever, Stimpy nodded in exuberant vigor as the car reversed slowly from the curb.

It’s that fourth night that Ren returns to the house with a half gallon of two percent, the yellow cap, just like his mother always kept in the fridge growing up, right. He lets them both into the front hall in a subtle march inside. Round the corner, he can hear the radio hidden underneath his mother’s humming, the noise of onions chopping against the countertop and the sting in the eyes to go with it.

“I’m back, Ma,” he calls with a hand cupped to the mouth. Whistling idly, he carries the milk into the kitchen to set it beside her, a kind pink smile dancing down just for him.

“What a good boy!” she says, and she can say anything she likes so long as it isn’t asking for her change back. Stimpy proves himself as the perfect diversion when he sniffs around the pots on the stovetop and asks in his usual glee, “What’s for dinner tonight, Mommy?”

Her blonde curls seem to bounce with every motion of knife to tomato. “Arroz rojo, sincronizadas with _homemade_ queso Oaxaca,” _chop, chop, chop, bounce, bounce, bounce,_ “And mole poblano! Because I’m celebrating having my baby back at home, and my baby likes it on his rice.”

Several blinks span whilst she continues her work. Stimpy glances to Ren, who’d been expecting it, and has at the ready, “Quesadillas and rice.”

“Oh, joy!” He shakes Ren by a scrawny shoulder. “Will you eat the black beans out for me like you do at Taco Bell?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ren says, dismisses him with a wave of the hand. In the process, his ears perk up to the sound of the front door behind them. His face tenses. “Actually, it’s about time we head out again.”

“Oh, Ren, please,” his mother says in remorse tight enough to make his stomach ache. “Stay and have dinner with us. Your father asked if you would.”

“What the fuck does he want with me?” 

“I want to spend some time with my son,” the Reverend answers from behind him, and it isn’t some wild surprise like in a book or pictureshow, because he’d heard the door rattle and his father walk right up behind him as he asked. It isn’t a surprise, but Ren flinches anyway, precisely at the moment a heavy hand falls on his shoulder and squeezes it, and all at once Ren is nine years old in a picture frame on the living room wall, and all at once Ren is helpless.

The dining room table is exactly as he remembers it.

The places are set with all the same dishes. All the same spoons. All the same food his mother liked to make. There’s one thing different, and it’s sitting right beside him, poking through his plate with the tongs of a fork. Ren sits in his same place, and Stimpy likes the seat beside him, his mother across, and his father ten feet tall at the very head of the table. Clearing his throat. Wiping his mouth on a napkin.

“How’s work been treating you?” his father prods. 

Ren bites roughly through ham and tortilla.

“Ren.”

“Huh?” says his full mouth. He shoots his gaze to the head of the table, swallows. “I didn’t know you were talking to me.”

He massacres another mouthful of sincronizada. With every chew, he can feel his father’s stare burning harder. 

“So how’s work, Ren?”

“Eh, you know,” he at last decides to respond. Fingers tap the table tiredly. “Too far away from here to be worth it. I’ll find something else.”

“The church could use some more ushers.”

Too immediately to deserve heaven, the idea of slipping some _service fees_ from the offertory basket fills his mind, but even then there’s no amount of stealing from Catholics that would make following in his father’s footsteps worth it. “I can figure it out myself. Besides, I don’t want to leave Mom here alone with Stimpy all day.” A thumb jerks toward the image of his dearest beside him with a pepper sticking from his mouth. “Nobody deserves that.”

“It’d be no trouble to give you both a job,” his father assures. “Your friend seems like a fine worker. What breed are you, son? Some sort of corgi?”

“I’m a fully grown cat, sir,” Stimpy answers with pride, eyes lolling opposite directions as he lifts his hand into a forehead salute.

Mr. Höek lays his silverware down just to squint down the table at him, and Ren can only bury his scalp in his hands. 

“A cat? Huh. Isn’t that something…” 

“What’s the matter with a cat?” Ren snaps without thinking much of it. “There’s nothing wrong with a cat. It’s perfectly natural for a Chihuahua to seek companionship with a lesser being of his own size group.” Avoiding eye contact, Ren stabs a fork into his pile of rice. “Lay off him, will you?”

“It’s alright, honey,” his mother tries to calm, blinks between her son and husband several strokes. “It’s wonderful to be a cat. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“I only thought,” floats his father’s unwanted opinion, “that if you had to stray so far away from God’s light, you’d at least pick another dog to do it with.”

“What I do in God’s darkness is none of your business! Piss off!”

Placid, his father remains in his seat, clears his throat, wipes his mouth on a napkin, remains in his seat, remains in his seat. 

Ren keeps his expression in its half growl pointed for the head of the table, glare never met. No. His father continues eating his dinner, in his seat, eyes serene and angled for his own space. A slow survey around the table finds his mother the same, both of them silent outside the occasional cough or clink of silverware on porcelain. When at last his glance hits to his left, he sees Stimpy is staring at nothing but him, a whiny look of worry on his stupid face, and it’s all Ren can do not to kick a hole through the very same dining table he never had the courage to snap at his father at in his youth. It shoots pure ecstasy through his veins, that sort of power to stand up for himself, and when he returns to his dinner, he’s ravenous, gnashing like the stray dog he is and hearing not another word from the spectators to his glory.

That’s all memory when he’s on the futon again.

“We ought to get a move on, Stimpy,” he says after chewing on it for a while, arms behind the head, knees crossed, eyes for the ceiling. “How’s about we call this our last night here. We can find a place to stay that’s closer to the factory. Or park outside it, curl up under the editorials and call it a life. Just you and me, old buddy, how’s that sound?”

With a twisted look of thought, Stimpy taps his lip. “But won’t your mother miss us?”

“She’ll be fine, she’s got her book club.” Ren watches Stimpy where he’s knelt by the bed, palms pressed together and omens high above. They used to like to do that together, kneel and pray for good blessings, safety, pectoral muscles, but Ren hasn’t felt very holy as of late- not that he wasn’t the same atheist he is now back there on his knees asking God to reward his suffering. He’s half certain Stimpy doesn’t know who he’s praying to, either, just knows that he wants his family to stay safe and keep Muddy Mudskipper on the air. Ren’s smacked him on the back of the head before and told him to knock off the pious crap, but that’s only on the nights he’s feeling his most agitated. Right now he’s content to let Stimpy finish mumbling his goodnights to the sky before pulling the blanket back to coax him into bed. “I’ll tell her we’re leaving tomorrow, we’ll get out of here before my dad gets home.”

“But, Ren…” Stimpy warbles from beside him. There’s a film of wet on his eyes when Ren glances over at him, enough to pinch a scoff in his throat and make him bark, “What? What’s the problem?”

Stimpy taps his fingertips together. “Well, it’s just...do you think being in your childhood home, surrounded by all the things you grew up with, along with the presence of your parents is altogether making you subconsciously revert to an adolescent state wherein you feel powerless, because you’ve both physically and psychologically returned to lacking the usual control you’ve been able to seize over your daily life, relationships and livelihood, and that this uncomfortable feeling is what’s driving you away rather than trying to reclaim your status as an autonomous adult due to an ingrained fear of consequences and punishment?”

Ren blinks hotly at him. His lips droop until they move to scowl, aggrieved squint aimed for the ceiling. “No,” he answers, “I just think my father is an idiot.”

“Okay,” Stimpy nods, smiles his way under the covers and grasps Ren up in both arms. 

Ren squirms, though does not protest despite the rancorous look on his face. “I’d be a millionaire right now if it weren’t for him.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I would’ve been able to finish college if he didn’t stop paying for it,” Ren goes on, sneers at the thought. The arms around him tighten, while his own cross over his chest. “All because I said I don’t believe in a fat stupid man in the clouds telling me what to do with my life. Because I’m not some spineless, blithering fool!”

“Uh-huh.”

“I could’ve been a biochemist! I could’ve cured polio!”

“Oh, but Ren,” figures into the equation, and Stimpy’s looking at him through the thickest lens of love he thinks he’s ever known. “You’re already a hero to me.”

And in one single punch to the gut so sweet, Ren thinks maybe he doesn’t need a milk crate of mismatched records at all to know right where he belongs. 

They’ll get out of here tomorrow. The monotony, for once, doesn’t quite bother him right now.


End file.
